For the past year, President Donald Trump has been waging a multifront campaign to rewrite the rules for the 2026 midterm elections and avoid a GOP wipeout. But so far, thanks to determined legal resistance, he has failed in nearly every phase of his assault.
The failure of his long battle to impose new election controls that would favor Republicans would be among the most significant setbacks of Trump’s presidency. He’s still trying, but Democrats and activist groups have mobilized hundreds of lawyers to challenge last-minute efforts to influence balloting in key states and congressional districts across the country.
“We know the playbook of Trump and the election deniers. We’ve sued them before, and we’ve beaten them before,” Norm Eisen, the head of Democracy Defenders Fund, told me in an interview. His group is organizing a $20 million effort that he calls Project 126, an implicit pledge to double the 63 legal victories that blocked Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Eisen shared a list of 10 midterm election threats his lawyers have mobilized to stop. They include attempts to purge voter rolls of supposed noncitizens, impose new rules for mail-in voting, deploy federal agents to polling places, seize ballots or voting machines and intimidate election officials.
“We’ve been preparing all year,” explained Seth Waxman, a former solicitor general under President Bill Clinton. Waxman is helping Eisen coordinate litigation strategy for volunteer lawyers at his firm, WilmerHale, and a dozen other prominent law firms. They will be ready to file complaints, requests for restraining orders, affidavits and other legal documents if Trump’s allies try to obstruct voting or ballot counting.
What’s encouraging, three weeks before Election Day, is that many of the potential threats on Eisen’s list already appear to have been stopped or disrupted. If Trump were a batter in a baseball game, he would have struck out, over and over.
Take Trump’s repeated attempts to restrict mail-in voting. In September, the Supreme Court halted his plan to give the U.S. Postal Service authority over the design of envelopes for mail-in ballots — which critics argued would amount to federalizing an election process that, under the Constitution, is run by states and local authorities. In an unsigned order, the court said Trump was “unlikely to succeed on the merits.”
Trump announced other measures to prevent alleged election fraud — and probably suppress voting — in a March executive order. But most of these moves have also stalled or been blocked outright by courts. And despite Trump’s repeated demands that Congress enact new voting rules, his Save America Act died for lack of support. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial board thought it was a bad idea.
A central pillar of Trump’s strategy was to challenge what he claimed was widespread voting by noncitizens. That argument never had a solid factual basis. As Waxman wrote in a brief for the Supreme Court filed this week in a voting rights case, “Voting by noncitizens is exceedingly rare.” In one study of 200 million votes cast in federal elections over a four-year period, there were only 15 indictments for noncitizen voting, the brief noted.
Nevada demonstrates the weakness of Trump’s case about noncitizen voting. The Department of Homeland Security initially claimed in July that as many as 15,903 noncitizens were registered to vote in the state. But after a manual review of a subset of those names, DHS said it found just 185 — and Nevada officials subsequently said that all 185 were, in fact, citizens.
The administration keeps demanding — unsuccessfully — that states hand over their voter rolls. A federal judge in Washington state ruled in September that this demand for voter data “violates federal law.” In August, Wyoming’s Republican governor rebuffed an attempt by federal monitors to interview voters and examine voting machines, saying it was “aggressive, unexpected, disruptive — certainly didn’t seem to show respect for the state.”
But the administration keeps trying. The Justice Department on Thursday sued California seeking to temporarily stop the state from counting mail ballots from some 20,000 people it claims are “likely noncitizens.” California officials have vowed to fight the effort.
The California Supreme Court has already rejected as “unlawful” a local sheriff’s seizure of 650,000 ballots cast in Riverside County. A concurring opinion by Associate Justice Goodwin H. Liu in that case noted: “I would underscore the seriousness of the violation here. This is not a case involving a few documents. It involves the unlawful removal and handling by armed deputies of over 1,000 boxes of … the most precious documents of the citizenry in a democracy: their votes.”
Another Trump election challenge that appears to have cratered is the investigation of ballots and voting machines coordinated by Tulsi Gabbard while she was director of national intelligence.
Gabbard joined the FBI in a Jan. 28 raid to seize 2020 election records in Fulton County, Georgia. But a federal judge quashed a subsequent Justice Department subpoena seeking the names of 2020 poll workers in a July order as “unreasonable,” noting “the low need for the subpoenaed information and the highly burdensome nature of the disclosure.”
Gabbard’s office had also seized some voting machines from Puerto Rico because of supposed irregularities. But since her departure, the investigation “seems to have died a quiet death,” according to a congressional official. That official cautioned that the DNI’s office could still disrupt the election process with a late announcement about foreign meddling by, say, China or Iran, which might throw the result into question.
Democrats’ biggest remaining fear, at this late point, is that Trump could create chaos on Election Day by calling out Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents or even troops. But here, too, there are bulwarks.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put down a small marker against military intervention in an August letter to Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Michigan), saying he had “no plans to send Federal military personnel or Federalized members of the National Guard to polling places during the 2026 elections” or to use troops to seize ballots, voting machines or other election-related material.
To challenge any ICE intervention, Eisen and others filed a suit in September in a D.C. federal court seeking an injunction against “deploying agents in a manner that unlawfully intimidates voters.” The complaint argues that the administration “has repeatedly sought to interfere with election systems and announced its readiness to unlawfully deploy law enforcement to voting sites.” A judge may rule on that case soon.
Allegations of election fraud are mother’s milk for Trump. He made such claims in 2016, when he thought he would lose his race against Hillary Clinton. When he did lose in 2020 to Joe Biden, he issued a blizzard of false fraud allegations in an effort to overturn the result. And now he’s trying again, relentlessly, as analysts predict his party is about to be swamped by a wave of angry voters.
Lawyers like Eisen and Waxman are doing everything they can to prevent election sabotage. But the best protection, surely, is an anti-Trump turnout at the polls so large that even he can’t challenge it.
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